An Introduction to Post-Insurrectionary Revengism: Politics in Light of Near Term Human Extinction

The converging crises that are descending on our planet are the direct responsibility of the powerful who preside over civilization today. The political and economic elite of yesteryear would not have known about the effects of burning fossil fuels, but the elite of today have no such excuse. They know very well what the consequences of their actions will be, and continue regardless. In this sense they are very culpable for the future murder of billions of humans, not to mention the trillions upon trillions of non-human animals, and the extinction of trillions of species.

If there is any doubt that the powerful know exactly what they are doing, this myth should be dispelled by very existence of luxury condos, priced in the millions, built in an abandoned nuclear missile silo at an undisclosed location in Kansas (http://www.survivalcondo.com/). The powerful are actively preparing for the disaster that they have unleashed, while the rest of us will be left to die in privation.

The mainstream environmental movement has been selling us a grand lie. The grand lie is the concept of personal responsibility among the powerless. They have sold the idea that we are just as culpable as the powerful because we drive cars, consume products, etc. As if we have a say in how civilization is organized! As if we have leverage against a self-perpetuating 12,000 year old system of slavery and exploitation! This is the grand dis-empowering lie that convinces people that they can avoid certain catastrophe by driving hybrid cars. To believe this lie is to excuse the powerful of their responsibility, and therefore never come to a clear understanding of what our future will look like.

Yet I believe that while confronting these power arrangements we run the risk of falling into a state of anticipatory victimization. Our extinction as a species, in my opinion, should not have any bearing on how we view ourselves in the interim. To hold on to the identity of the victim, we sabotage the opportunity to make the most out of what very well may be our last decades on this planet. Our narrative is such that we are prone to falling into a Post Traumatic Stress (or perhaps I should say Pre-Traumatic Stress) reaction. Dealing with this reaction means that we must reclaim power over our lives, and re-frame our narrative to one of empowerment.

The first step that comes to my mind is that we must not blame ourselves. A major tactic of corporate power, and one that the mainstream NGO environmental movement buys into, is to lay the blame for climate change at the feet of every individual who uses fossil fuels. This has a bi-fold effect. Number one, it removes blame from the powerful, who under this rubric only share as much blame as poor people driving to work at McDonald’s and Walmart. Number two, it derails the environmental movement into a foray of useless spending habits, personal guilt, and at the extreme, suicidal grief and depression. In short, we must understand that this is not our doing.

Overcoming trauma means re-framing the narrative of the traumatic event as to empower the victim. The traumatic event that we are dealing with is gradual and unfolding. This makes even perceiving the narrative as a whole very difficult. However, it also means that we have the opportunity to shift the narrative in real time, as someone fending off an attacker might do. Although our actions may not change anything in the long term, and our species will still be doomed to extinction, we can live our time left on our own terms.

What does this mean for how we live? What would fending off our attacker look like? I don’t make claims to know exactly. I can say, however that our politics are going to look much different than they have in the past . Although I generally refuse to debate to which degree our collective future is set in stone, I do feel comfortable extrapolating current trends. Placing hypothetical situations at the forefront of political thought seems foolish to me, as none of us are clairvoyant. Hypothetically, if all fossil fuels were left in the ground, and no more were burned as of tomorrow, we might have a chance of survival as a species. Hypothetically, a solar storm could knock the grid offline, saving the natural world from further extirpation. Hypothetically, the powerful could adopt humane policies to reduce human suffering during ecological and industrial collapse. We know, however, that these are sordid fantasies. They are sordid because they detract from real suffering being visited upon the natural world everyday, and the suffering of those humans to which the apocalypse is not a distant future event, or a clever metaphor. For many people, the end of the world has arrived, in all of it’s painful indifference to life, love, and any sense of fairness or equality. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a vision of the future, look at the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I’ve taken this to mean that our politics must necessarily be reaction based. There will be no better tomorrow, no salvation, no retribution or justice. There will be pain, a pain that we will not be able to alleviate, only react to in the interim, before our inevitable untimely deaths. For these reasons I consider political philosophies that seek to create a better world outdated, and I feel we are forced to adopt a reaction based politic.

Reactive politics do not have constraints, they do not adhere to a specific goal, they are unique to the individual, and are therefore indomitable. For each individual with a reactive politics, there is the potential for action. Reactive politics can not be defeated, for it has no desire to win, indeed, winning is seen as impossible, and abstract to the point of protecting civilization from it’s enemies. Revolt, for the reactive individual, is for it’s own sake. Reactive politics cannot be co-opted, they exist only in the moment of action. When wild animals, and wild humans kill civilization’s emissaries, they are engaging in reactive politics. The killing is not meant to culminate into a revolution, nor is it based in an ideology, but is a reaction to an immediate threat. Humans engage in reactive politics even when all hope is lost, as was the case for many of those who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. They chose to die in their own terms, despite the knowledge that their deaths were certain. Over this century, as more and more communities come to see that hope is lost to head off climate change, reactivity will become a common form of radical politics, and the powerful will have much more to fear.

McPherson writes: Assuming I survive the cutting-room floor, I’ll be featured in a televised episode of National Geographic on 1 November 2015. Footage includes Bill Nye at the mud hut. Details can be found here. Mundane trailer is embedded below.

______

Catch Nature Bats Last on the radio with Mike Sliwa and Guy McPherson. To catch us live, tune in every Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, or catch up in the archives here. If you prefer the iTunes version, including the option to subscribe, you can click here.

______

Looking for San Francisco Bay Area folks to raise $$$$ to bring Guy to San Francisco. Please contact amyvegan@gmail.com if you are willing to donate towards Guy’s travel here.

Written in 1992, two years before his death and twenty-three years ago, this poem pretty much sums it up. “Hank” saw the future and naturally his fingers turned to the bottle. More often than not mine have as well, but bottles also make good bombs. Excellent essay.

***

Dinosauria (We)
by charles “hank” bukowski

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

Which is why I remain sanguine at chaos of all sorts–typhoons, tsunamis, uprisings in Jerusalem, population explosion (the more people, the more difficult it is to control them)…

These are all things I can’t influence anyway. But paradoxically they only increase the focus on constructiveness that attempts to reduce suffering in the arenas (usually local) where one has a modicum of control.

“Hypothetically, if all fossil fuels were left in the ground, and no more were burned as of tomorrow, we might have a chance of survival as a species.” ….and all the hypothetical trillions.
Hypothetically, we could choose a completely different timeline and have a different past and future.
Hypothetically, someone could come up with a solution to the 300,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting all around with no plan to keep it out of the environment and from killing trillions and trillions for billions of years.

“The converging crises that are descending on our planet are the direct responsibility of the powerful who preside over civilization today“.

Indeed.

“The political and economic elite of yesteryear would not have known about the effects of burning fossil fuels …”

That depends on how far back you are taking about.Tim.

We have internal documents of Oil-Qaeda which show that they have known for decades, and have chosen to deliberately deceive the public about it:

“Internal fossil fuel industry memos reveal decades of disinformation — a deliberate campaign to deceive the public that continues even today.

For nearly three decades, many of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to deceive the public about the realities and risks of climate change.

Their deceptive tactics are now highlighted in this set of seven “deception dossiers”—collections of internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.

Each collection provides an illuminating inside look at this coordinated campaign of deception, an effort underwritten by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy, and other members of the fossil fuel industry.”
(The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises – 4, quoting Union of Concerned Scientists).

@El Sea,
Many thanks for posting Hank’s poem. Been awhile since I’ve read him. I had forgotten what a truly great poet he was.Time to get his books down from the shelves and dig in. Always found his writing a comfort to me.

Carbon energy tax dividends 100% privately yours in the form of a new international e-currency and no share for government and corporations and a decade long draw down of all national currencies. The money spent on carbon can be used to price organic food over corporate food. We cannot allow food conglomerates to survive. But hey, I’m just funny that way.

“Humans engage in reactive politics even when all hope is lost, as was the case for many of those who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. They chose to die in their own terms.”

That’s an apt description of the recent uptick in violence in Palestine. Guess they’re ahead of the curve.

@ david higham “I notice that the new prime minister of Canada has three kids. A cattle being led to the slaughter.

Anyone read the Bill Gates interview in the new issue of the Atlantic? One on level he does get how serious climate change is and how intractable the problem is. Yet… he’s still holding out for a miracle. He’s still hopeful that technological innovation (with an assist from the government coffers) can save the day.

Fucking awesome, how people who preceded us saw this, like Bukowsi, certainly Morrison and Watts, as well, and many others! The sense of commune with them now is beyond sublime, it gives them life they never had alive! It’s inexplicable!

Managing 7+bilion people en route to 0 (zero) people ais’t gonna be easy, seeing that some are in full stampede towards the cliff of industrial denouement and others have started the migratory stampede of abrupt climate & regime change. Expect to see everything from the divine to the demonic.

After running the numbers on a set of four equations representing human society, a team of NASA-funded mathematicians has come to the grim conclusion that the utter collapse of human civilization will be “difficult to avoid.”

The exact scenario may vary, but in the coming decades humanity is essentially doomed to some variant of “Elites” consuming too much, “resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society.”

That is, unless civilization is ready for one of two “major policy changes”: inequality must be “greatly reduced” or population growth must be “strictly controlled.”

The apocalyptic pronouncements, set to be published in an upcoming edition of Ecological Economics, come courtesy of a U.S. team led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei and funded in part by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Some brilliant work on the Arctic methane threat has been done by a Russian scientist Natalia Shakhova and others who indicate that we are in a very perilous position, if we don’t find a way of reducing the atmospheric methane and depressurizing the undersea methane to stop the massive methane eruptions there. I and some other workers have designed a radio-laser Atmospheric methane destruction system based on the early Russian radio-wave induced conversion of methane to nano-diamonds. This radio-laser system can be installed on nuclear powered boats such as the 40 Russian Arctic ice breakers and start immediate work on destroying the atmospheric methane clouds that are building up in the Arctic.

Tim Buchanan- Thanks for the essay contribution! This idea of responsibility is one that has come up rather frequently since I’ve been coming to this site, and while I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: responsibility is relative. We all have a DEGREE of guilt in all of this. If we didn’t, Guy would never have left Empire to do what he did. Those of us who have not followed his lead (myself included) have done so with the understanding that we are consciously contributing to the problem. No, it might not be on the level that Exxon is contributing to the problem, but we’re part of the problem nonetheless. When all the “anti-1%” rhetoric came out of Occupy Wall Street, I was on board. Then I realized that I’m actually in the 1%. In America? No. Globally? Yes ($33,000 USD per year qualifies you). And why shouldn’t it be a global comparison? Why should I sit in my comfortable little apartment with the lights on and my dishwasher running and NOT think about the billions of people who don’t have anything remotely as luxurious? Why do I expect the CEO of Exxon to give up his entire life, when I’m not even willing to stop buying shoes made by sweatshop workers in Pakistan? I say, “Well, I have no choice. If I want shoes, that’s what I need to do. All shoes are made by sweatshop workers.” That’s pure laziness on my part. And I admit it. I am a lazy citizen of the Empire who knows that the net environmental benefit of living ‘perfectly’ however that’s defined will not keep any of the shit from hitting the fan. Therefore, I continue to participate. I freely admit it. Somehow I sleep at night, which is always quite baffling to me. I attribute it to the human capacity for denial and I have perfected it.

There are many examples of our collective guilt. For instance, most of us live in occupied territory. White Europeans just came in and took it by taking advantage of the generosity of the natives (I used to have an awesome bumper sticker that said, “Was Columbus a terrorist or an illegal alien?”). Are we giving it back? No. Should we? Probably impractical at this point. But are we continuing to screw over the people we took it from? Yes. Do we really need to do that? No. Do we do it as a continuation of the genocide we started? Yes. Again, this is one of thousands of examples of the ways in which “we” reap the benefits of Empire. We compare our lives to the “1%” because we forget that we are the 1%. And before you say, “Well, I don’t make $33,000 USD so I’m not in the 1%!” So you’re in the top 26%, my mistake ($5,000 USD per year). I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that you are one of the billions who live on less than $2 a day. We’re slicing the salami here, people. Who gets to decide who is guilty? If there was no such thing as global warming, would we have chugged along accepting that 30,000 kids die every day from starvation and/or curable disease? Humans are the problem. If you are human, you are part of that problem. SORRY! And if you can read this, you are privileged because you have a computer with internet access AND you learned to read. Sometimes I feel like I’m preaching to the choir, but then I see that half of you STILL think we’re “innocent.” Ugh. No. The only true innocents are the non-humans. Which is why the sooner humans disappear, the better.

Everybody gets so self-righteous around this issue, yet the only one walking the walk seems to be Guy. In fairness, I don’t know much about anyone else here, but I’m pretty sure we’re not talking Gandhi-like living situations here. One thing I agree about, Tim- there will be a violent end to all this. As JFK said (I think?)- “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” I just think we’re all mistaken as to who is in the crosshairs. It’s not Exxon or the so-called 1%- it’s probably us (the REAL 1%).

Sorry for the looooong ass rant!! I think this might be a record for me. Thanks for allowing me to put off my work for an extra 20 minutes…

p.s. To the person who posted the “UTOPIA” clip- THANK YOU SO MUCH! I ended up binge watching the entire series. Very apropos!

From the article:
“The mainstream environmental movement has been selling us a grand lie. The grand lie is the concept of personal responsibility among the powerless. They have sold the idea that we are just as culpable as the powerful because we drive cars, consume products, etc. As if we have a say in how civilization is organized! As if we have leverage against a self-perpetuating 12,000 year old system of slavery and exploitation! This is the grand dis-empowering lie that convinces people that they can avoid certain catastrophe by driving hybrid cars. To believe this lie is to excuse the powerful of their responsibility, and therefore never come to a clear understanding of what our future will look like.
Yet I believe that while confronting these power arrangements we run the risk of falling into a state of anticipatory victimization. Our extinction as a species, in my opinion, should not have any bearing on how we view ourselves in the interim. To hold on to the identity of the victim, we sabotage the opportunity to make the most out of what very well may be our last decades on this planet. Our narrative is such that we are prone to falling into a Post Traumatic Stress (or perhaps I should say Pre-Traumatic Stress) reaction. Dealing with this reaction means that we must reclaim power over our lives, and re-frame our narrative to one of empowerment.”

David Higham- Again, it’s relative. That was my point. My post was addressing the people who actually READ THIS BLOG. Are you a hunter-gatherer? I didn’t think so. Then please stop acting like the savior of hunter-gatherers. Oy vey.

Right on, Tim… agree with your assessment on the relative culpability of the sociopaths at the helm vs. the rest. About 10 years ago, I bought some carbon credits to offset an year’s worth of emissions from my car. And my day job was to come up with ways to help improve the corporate productivity of pillagers and destroyers of the planet. What good did those carbon credits do? Other than to assuage a little guilt from a thoroughly confused mind.

The insanity continues today with guilt-ridden professionals buying electric cars to commute to work where they spend their day figuring out better ways to continue the charade. Computer scientists that come up with better algorithms to push more product, engineers that come up with bigger bulldozers and dams, lawyers that lubricate the wheels of the machine with clever language and on and on. Oh, but that green image is so soothing to the weary soul.

——–

babajingo, yes, we’re all guilty, but then you say it’s all relative. On a relative scale, the hunter-gatherers do exist somewhere, don’t they. They are also humans, aren’t they? Just because they don’t have the Internet doesn’t vaporize them out of existence and out of the larger picture. We often generalize our stories as those belonging to all humanity when we say “humans are the problem”. Such a characterization is missing something that some of us consider somewhat vital to understanding and navigating our current predicament. We ignore it and we continue to wallow in our own self-important stories of civilization that say we’re just faulty by nature, the inevitable flip-side of our higher intelligence, the way evolution goes, etc. All humans! Right!

So, again, on a scale, where do most of the 7.3 Billion humans on the planet fall? Where do the indigenous people fall? And where do the sociopathic elites fall?

It’s not uncommon for an invading army to be ordered to shoot at those of their own who are further ahead on the front lines in case they turn back and attempt to return. That’s the story of billions of people on the planet today: kill or die. And yet, there’s degrees of culpability, if you care to look for such subtlety. The generals who ordered their men to shoot at their fellow soldiers do not fall at the same place on the continuum/scale as those on the front lines being shot at. Not in my book.

Yes, yes, if those on the front lines had gone through all the same circumstances and situations and have had the same genes as the generals, they would have behaved in the same way. Right. That’s perhaps true but it doesn’t help understand why things are so fucked up today. That argument simply doesn’t address certain questions. That argument encourages us to stop looking further. And the people who espouse that argument have many times shut down those who seek to delve deeper.

Satish Musunuru: “So, again, on a scale, where do most of the 7.3 Billion humans on the planet fall? Where do the indigenous people fall? And where do the sociopathic elites fall?”

In my opinion, all 7.3 billion fall “below” (whatever that even means) the other 8.7 million species on the planet. That is what I mean by relativity. More importantly, who gives a fuck where I think people should fall on the scale of guilt? It’s not up to me to decide that. And it’s actually not up to any of us as individuals. We only have control over ourselves. If you think Exxon is to blame, go be the Tank Man of the movement and prevent them from doing more harm. Or just continue to point accusatory self-righteousness fingers at others.

Yes, we’re all guilty and it’s relative. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Root cause : An unconscious fundamental existential terror which creates an unseen context of fear in which the psychology develops and which plays out as the entire horror show..

Cure : One conscious direct recognition of the reality of “me” , this feeling of “hereness” that is always present, unchanging and untouched by anything that comes and goes. This feeling of “me-ness” is extremely subtle – the faintest sensation – but my belief is that anyone that tries to taste/touch/look at themselves directly will succeed.

Over time the brain spontaneously re-organises/ re-wires itself and the internal warfare – got to get rid of this- got to hold onto that- fizzles out.

If there is any hope for humans (and maybe there isn’t) this is it. Otherwise the majority are too conflicted to cooperate collectively.

My challenge/offering is for you to verify this in your own experience and not to believe a single word I am saying.

GOOD News:
Climate Change is solved. We will be OK.
It has been discovered that certain people can suck the carbon and methane out of the atmosphere simply by sucking it up their assholes. There it will be magically morphed into an aromatic rose-like juice to be sweated out as a harmless clear liquid.
We are saved.

“There will be pain, a pain that we will not be able to alleviate, only react to in the interim, before our inevitable untimely deaths.”

I have long dwelled on who I was going to ‘get’, with MY OWN HANDS, as the Mad Max era commences in earnest. (Not sure how I will absolutely recognize the event)

I have vacillated between a bully in our town (the closest and most accessible asshole) and my own brother (probably not possible because I’m sure he will be in the silo in Kansas). Pretty pathetic I know.

BUT. I am pissed at many individuals and I can only control who I will take down with great glee and suffering. Too bad, I’m that way I guess.

I don’t claim to know if anything can be solved regarding climate change.
I do know that the inner and the outer are not separate – a unitary process.
I do know that the fear and its effects are gradually fading from this local mind/creature/character.
I wonder what a world would look like if 7 billion humans were completely free of fear? (regardless of climate change )

the Fukushima 137Cs signal doubled again to levels in excess of 4 Bq/m3 in the upper 200 m. Adjusted circulation model estimates that match our measured values indicate that future levels of Fukushima 137Cs off the North American coast will likely attain maximum values of at least 5 Bq/m3 by 2015-2016.

The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply, he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation: woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is directly responsible for the current ecological situation which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life, including human life. Man has treated nature much as he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence. The phenomenological world is characterized by its diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interactions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world consists of finding the proper relationship to it.

Yes—– in concurrence with others (Sabine and more) —— thanks Tim and thanks to El Sea for the poem!

I find more comfort (oddly enough) in that Bukowski poem than . . . say . . for example the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

Many years ago I was given the book Dream Work. After reading the poem(and other things going on in my life at the time) Wild Geese it felt like my desire for trust in the universe and a sense of positive connection between human and nonhuman life was manifested. I remember feeling a sense of unity with all life . . a connection to some sort of (what felt like at the time) essence of what is truth, beauty, love. I chose to have a child around that time; I believed humans could and would evolve in a direction of having reverence for all life on earth.

Now I read the poem and feel like it’s almost a cruel joke and something that was part of my denial:

She writes:

“Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again”

In my hormone addled young brain it seemed like the rain WAS clear as it moved across beautiful landscapes. Yes, I knew there were serious problems but . . . surely humans wouldn’t go down the path of biocide.

Would also like to council those who have a problem with the term “fascism” and “fascist”. If you wait around long enough telling yourself stories about how these people not dressed in German military uniforms bedecked in Iron Crosses and swastikas, not spouting off about burning Jews, etc… could not possibly be fascists. And all this fascist talk is way over the top, and anti-german, etc, etc…
Then I think you’ll be in for a rude awakening when your time comes.

Let me just relate a personal story from last year in my adopted garrison. There were “anti-elected-government” marches in the street. They were calling for complete demolition of the elected government and absolute totalitarian rule. I called them fascists. One of these old librul hippies, with his local concubine old lady was out here berating me about calling these thugs out as fascists. He told me i’m way over the top. Then he starts complaining about how “the elected government” is crap because they are not “defending” the perfume shop in the mall where his old lady works. Whine Whine Whine.

Well. Turned out that the “anti-government protesters” were full supported, financed, manned and armed to the teeth by the military. A few weeks later the military ran a coup and burned the government to the ground. All human rights out. Elections cancelled forever. The country’s top poet assassinated in broad daylight. The elected PM’s kid threatened to be blown up in his school. Full Censorship across the board. 50 year jail terms for facebook posts. Kids in jail for playing the French National Anthem on their mobile phone. There is a lot more here affecting me personally, but I will stop now.

If you think “fascist” is too over the top, you are probably one of the ones who has a problem, and not at all the people using the word. See the book by Milton Mayer “They Thought They Were Free”.

Jim Willie, a gold bug statistician, calls the entire current US/UK paradigm “the fascist business model”….but i’m sure he’s just some kind of over the top anti-german anti-italian extremist.

Wester Says:
October 21st, 2015 at 9:33 am
The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply, he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation: woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is directly responsible for the current ecological situation which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life, including human life. Man has treated nature much as he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence. The phenomenological world is characterized by its diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interactions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world consists of finding the proper relationship to it.

@ Caroline, thanks for this: “The geese don’t know what the hell they’re doing anymore due to homo rapiens desecration of the landscape”. I feel the same way about the oliver poem, which at one time I really liked. “homo-rapian” is my new favorite self-descriptor!

And Wren, thanks for the burroughs clip. Luv it.

And thanks to all others for the positive feedback. Along with being a visionary, bukowski was a drunk and maybe a misogynist. These labels fail to capture his complexity. Labels fail us all. I’m a mostly kind woman and also a homo-rapian. In the cosmic context of biocide, like most of us here I’ve done far more harm than good and continue my destructive ways on a daily basis; but in the human culture context, if I’ve turned only one other person on to bukowski then I’ve done at least one positive thing.

I wonder where Mary Oliver’s head is ‘at’ these days. From what I hear she lives in seclusion, spends no time online, and does not like visitors. She lives in her own little cocoon of oblivion, where she can fully live her koan of astonishment without the added heartbreak of being aware of NTE. But I still love some of her poems, even though she never had her finger on the pulse in the same raw way Bukowski did.

In the current issue of North Carolina Wildlife, there is an article, not available online, about the life and death of one particular white egret. This magnificent and magical creature was the unlucky recipient of a gps tracking device, a large ugly thing somehow fixed to to his back, between his wings. Even with this major handicap, he still managed to migrate, and his migration was tracked from April to December of last year, all the way from the outer banks of North Carolina, a stop over in Cuba, down to his traditional wintering area in Columbia, South America. His body was found there in what had been a swamp, but was now dried up from drought due to climate change. Forensic evidence was death by starvation.
So write a poem about that, Mary Oliver!

“…..”Give us back our well-worn husk,” they said, “where we were so snug and comfortable.”
And then they tried word magic.
“Conditions are fundamentally sound,” they said — by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen.
But they were wrong.
They did not know that you can’t go home again.
America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else.
But no one knew what that something else would be
and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders
grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets….”

Who here has taken the Collapse Personality Profile test? Interested to know how many respondents are from NBL. I should have included a question about what your main collapse website was. Always forget something on these things.

@Caroline, you are absolutely right.. thanks for sharing the story of your own personal apocalypse (lifting of the veil).

======
=============
@Webster, thanks for the Dworkin quote. I wonder how it jibes with your arguments against original sin, though…

I appreciate, too, your report on fascism in your area: the hippie wanting to defend the shopping mall is hilarious at this safe distance. Maybe we can define the colloquial epithet of “fascism” as “any authoritarian structure which threatens my privilege” (as opposed to the authoritarian structures which maintain it).

“Fascism”, though, has a real history, and its symbolic Roman “fasce” (bundles) are displayed in the US halls of power. Your muscle fibers are bound by fasce (a “fascia” is singular) to restrict them and enable them work to better together, for stability, support, and even to keep you upright.

I see, in the average person whose current standard of well-being is threatened, a desire for an increase in fascism because of the obvious benefits of that system: efficiency, clarity, single-minded purposefulness, and self-protection which generally falls along racial/tribal lines. Any cursory look at the comment section of US stories about the Muslim refugees/”refugees” in Germany will instruct you.

Fascism simply didn’t come up as a technology earlier in human evolution because there was no need for it. You can’t have “fascism” in a group of 10 people, or 100. If termites could survive in groups of 10, they wouldn’t bother building mounds many meters high and evolving hierarchical social structures. There’s no such thing as “equal” termites, bees, wolves, chimps, etc.

You can’t rail against fascism without seeing it for the effective survival strategy it is. Note that the fascists of the WWII era were never actually defeated, but used the “corporate” side of their “state+corporate power” equation to come back to fight another day.

—
——-
Webster, you’re in the uncomfortable space I think a lot of leftists are in: they want things to be “fair” to existing humans, but they also want a lot of people to survive, and some even want the human population to increase, at the same time increasing everyone’s well-being. Organized leftist/socialist notions all seem to be mutually-exclusive fantasy propositions, right up there with Bernie’s “free college for everyone”.

When you read the “wealth inequality” stats you have to analyze, also, what is meant by “wealth”. Anything denominated in fiat currency is close to meaningless. Donald Trump (someone who is notable for having often had a negative net worth millions or billions more than the collective net worth of the readership here) is a case in point. Who says he is “wealthy”? and what does he really physically control? Most of the world’s paper “wealth” is fictitious, and those said to “own” 1/2 the world’s “wealth” are in no such actual position. They command more, to be sure, of an increasingly derelict and unprofitable infrastructure, but the lion’s share of its value is completely invented as is conventionally reckoned.

Fascists, on the other hand, don’t really harbor such cornucopian fantasies, I don’t think. They know that power comes from the end of a gun, that the increased resources becoming exponentially-more-necessary in order for the current crop of humans to survive are acquired by theft and monopolization and that all one needs to do, politically, is make that theft and monopolization seem legitimate. Fascists understand that it is “us or them”. As well-brought-up, cultured westerners raised in a time of relative plenty, we aren’t allowed to formally acknowledge the fact that equality and democracy (even faux-equality and faux-democracy) are products of a certain bien-pensant salon: hard-to-maintain fictions and luxuries in our current set of circumstances.

We are not going to eradicate tribalism from the human behavior set. The question will be what new tribal identities will be formed, if any, and what will be their nature? There are tribes of middle-class idiots (in the original sense of the word.. I don’t think anyone realizes how many) who are out there creating alternative worlds in which to lose themselves. These “worlds” with their “guilds” and “nobilities” are pretty real to them, although they play themselves out impotently in computer space and over improbable physical distances. Thinking I was following a real citation, I was led to the site of one “Lady Something-or-other” as though this character were a real person. There’s a massive amount of creative human energy going right down the pisser in these spaces as they assemble in far-flung locations for “cons” and costumed role-playing (not to mention, of course, the more purely-consumption-oriented related fan spaces seen at the “comic-cons”, the people dedicated to regurgitating derivative “fan-fic”, as well as those lost to conventional commercial computer games).

Then there’s the tribe that Jim Kunstler inveighs against: the extravagantly-tattooed and -pierced, or the droopy-drawered, who have made the implied statement that they are neither interested nor available for regular employment, even should they be qualified for it.

These are examples of natural human instincts being perverted by circumstances. There is nothing to be done to remediate any of this because there are simply too many people in too little space, and the space that is left is worn out, exhausted, and dying. So the people (after a great deal of concomitant fighting) will also wear out, exhaust themselves, and die. There is no “saving” anything, and there never was hope of that even without climate change.

—
In the future, most of us here will have to answer that question, “shall we, shall *I* survive over them?”.. them being the chickens in the backyard, the songbirds, whales, tuna, bees or Monarch butterflies, the neighbors, the family dog, the folks in Syria, Iraq or Iran. In fact, those aren’t future questions, they are eternal questions that we have always been answering in the affirmative, day after day after day, every time we wake up… otherwise we would not be alive and posting here: we would be dead of suicide by voluntary starvation.

You, me, Guy.. all of us here are no different from anyone else involved in the now-global system which has successfully and spontaneously evolved to increase human biomass…

“We” decide every day that, pound for pound, “we” are worth more than “them”.

I would like to commend you on your efforts, but unfortunately, I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote.

You start with:

“The converging crises that are descending on our planet are the direct responsibility of the powerful who preside over civilization today.

That’s quite an assumption that just so happens to be the premise of your essay. If it’s not true, then neither is the following.

“The political and economic elite of yesteryear would not have known about the effects of burning fossil fuels, but the elite of today have no such excuse. They know very well what the consequences of their actions will be, and continue regardless. In this sense they are very culpable for the future murder of billions of humans, not to mention the trillions upon trillions of non-human animals, and the extinction of trillions of species.”

So, you’re saying that everyone other than the ‘political and economic elite’s haven’t a choice to burn fossil fuels? Are you suggesting we are being forced to burn fossil fuels?

If we do have a choice in full knowledge of its effect, how are we not culpable ourselves? You sort of glossed over that issue. I mean, if no one used fossil fuels, then it would still be in the ground, along with all the coal as well as most forests.

So, the political and economic elites are guilty of providing a product in which everyone just so happened to take advantage?

Only they are directly responsible for the converging ecological crisis, because we victimized humans are only responsible for willingly using their products, because only they knew about the negative effects of CO2?

No, no……it’s not that I need to keep warm in the winter and somehow need to create heat to do so, and that if I have children they will as well, as will their children’s children’s children……..

No, no…..it’s not that burning of fossils fuels provides a comparative advantage in the short run to not burning them.

Yes, yes….”whoever they are” should have known, and knowingly decided to regress back to a previous state of civil development at some unknown point in the past.

Somehow the fact that humanity is one huge heat engine, doesn’t factor into your equation?

You finish with:

“Over this century, as more and more communities come to see that hope is lost to head off climate change, reactivity will become a common form of radical politics, and the powerful will have much more to fear.”

Here’s another take: Over this next HALF century…..food will become increasingly difficult to produce up to the point agriculture ceases to exist.

I wonder what becomes of billions of people who neither grow their own food nor have access to food?

Do they frantically spend the rest of their lives vainly searching for something to eat before they to starve to death, or do they become as you say “post-insurrectionary revenginist” before they too starve to death, but at least they’ll be distracted with blaming the TPTB for there being no food in the grocery stores and shaking their fist in the air at whoever they were taught to believe is ultimately responsible for having created civilization in the first place?

We are a species wired for faith; just because one may no longer believe in a mystical sky god, it doesn’t mean we stop believing in all the other myths we project unto “reality”, such as continuing to frame the inevitable objective ecological dilemma of overshoot into subjective relative socio-political terms we can better emotionally accept.

We human are going to pretend we can “game the system” until there are no humans. Most will choose the blame game, simply because it’s far more comforting to think someone else is responsible and that we are somehow innocent. And that has nothing to do with the fact that TPTB are absolute monsters, it just that their greater culpability doesn’t have the magical power or erasing our own, we only like to think it does.

Take a little trip back with father Tiresias,
Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through.
I have crossed between the poles, for me there’s no mystery.
Once a man, like the sea I raged,
Once a woman, like the earth I gave.
But there is in fact more earth than sea.

I propose that an individual’s culpability be measured by the sum of their own direct and indirect energy consumption plus the direct and indirect energy consumption of all the people whose actions they direct or control. That will be used to determine how bad we think they should feel about themselves.

Rather, he pointed to Jerusalem’s then-grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who met with the Nazi leader in Germany in the early 1940s.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said Tuesday at the 37th Zionist Congress, according to a transcript on his website. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’

I propose that an individual’s culpability be measured by the sum of their own direct and indirect energy consumption plus the direct and indirect energy consumption of all the people whose actions they direct or control. That will be used to determine how bad we think they should feel about themselves.”- PC

I propose that if you ever use the term “Bodhi” in your name you are absolved from any culpability since you have ascended to a higher plane of consciousness, have become Awakened and are above the responsibilities of mere mortals.

You often make interesting points, and many of them are valid. Indeed, without contrarian perspectives it would all be very boring and perhaps even unscientific. Hypotheses need to be questioned, and supporting evidence presented.

You say:

‘So, you’re saying that everyone other than the ‘political and economic elite’s haven’t a choice to burn fossil fuels? Are you suggesting we are being forced to burn fossil fuels?’

You seem to question whether the burning of fossil fuels is a matter of choice made by ordinary people or a choice made for them by those towards the top of the pyramid.

I put it to you that ordinary folk have had little or no choice, in the real sense of the word, and they still have little or no choice. All the evidence indicates that the overconsumption of fossil fuels (along with overconsumption of practically everything else) has been a ‘choice’ fostered on ordinary people by exploiters and other scumbags at the top of the social pyramid.

Let’s go back to medieval England, prior to the Enclosure Acts. Every district was largely self-sufficient in energy and food. From the time of the Norman conquest, (disregarding times of population collapse due to plague) ordinary folk had ever-decreasing access to local food supplies and local energy supplies. Greedy land-owners pushed for ever greater land ownership until, by the middle of the nineteenth century, only the village green was left as common land throughout most of England. What choice did ordinary folk have? If they objected they got slaughtered if they were lucky, and tortured and then slaughtered if they were unlucky.

The construction of a world-dominating British navy saw the stripping of much of the English countryside in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, along with the commencement of stripping much of the rest of the world. Portsmouth was home to one of the biggest industrial complexes in the world. Ordinary folk had no say in anything that happened.

The industrialisation of the wool sector forced previously self-sufficient people into factories or coal mines. Do want to work for us or do you want to starve? Cotton from the colonies fostered further industrialisation and further loss of woodland and arable land.

By the middle of the nineteenth century millions of people in England were dependent on coal, transported from Newcastle to London by sea and in other regions by canal. The expansion of the railway system was as much about distributing coal as anything else. Thus, the city I was born in, a long way from any coalfields, was almost totally dependent on coal until the 1960s; coal-fired electricity generation; household gas produced from coal; steam trains; coal used for home heating. What choices did my parent have? (not that they knew anything about the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels, other than immediate air pollution). Do you want to work for us or starve? Do you want to burn coal or have you house pipes freeze and burst? (For there were certainly no supplies of wood for burning anywhere in the district).

If we look at the development of American, we find that it was the shortage of whale oil that triggered the quest for rock oil, to be refined into lamp oil. It was the greed and unethical practices of Rockefeller that resulted in a near monopoly in the US by the end of the nineteenth century. And not content with his near monopoly there, Rockefeller endeavoured to corner the Chinese market.

What were ordinary folk, especially those in the densely-populated eastern US cities, supposed to do? Sit in the dark for up to 16 hours a day?

Along comes electric lighting, and then electric vehicles. So what do the oil cartels do? Buy up tram systems and close them, thereby forcing ordinary folk in the direction of private car ownership, and eventually succeeding.

After WW2, the nation plan for transport just happens to be the motor industry plan, which involved construction of highways for automobiles and truck. What say di ordinary people have? None.

And as most of us know, Bernays was employed by corporation to overcome the natural tendency of people to be thrifty, and to persuade them to consume as much as possible. Although individuals could resist in eh short term, such was the power of the corporation over such a long period of time that they created a completely new paradigm. What choice does a youngster, born into to most energy-squandering and dysfunctional set of living arrangements in all of history but thinking it is all perfectly normal, have? It is politicians (and the behind-the-scenes bankers and corporations) who have set the agenda, not ordinary people.

I rarely watch any television, but when I do the programmes are constantly interrupted by people screaming at me to buy something now, to fly in a plane soon, to take a cruise on a ship, consume, consume, consume!

Around a decade ago I did battle with an electricity company which advertised that ‘coal was perfect for cleaning carpets’. Use our electricity and burn more coal.

Around that time I participated in an energy forum, at which corporate leaders and politicians were advocating ‘clean coal’ as the ‘solution’ to New Zealand’s energy future.

It was around that time that the cretinous Chris de Freitus, supposedly professor of environmental studies at the University of Auckland, was advocating the burning of coal because ‘carboin dioxide is a harmless gas and a plant nutrient’.

Concurrent with all that nonsense was a campaign by gas suppliers to persuade consumers that burning natural gas is ‘good for the environment’.

Last week, whilst cycling across town, I saw a New Plymouth District Council vehicle ‘proudly’ announcing the arrival of ‘Georgie Pie’ ( an offshoot of McDonald’s) at the local stadium. And every week NPDC does its best to persuade the populace to increase consumption of fossil fuels. Business, business, business.

So, with the general populace being lied to on a continuous basis by politicians, local councils, corporate leaders and even university professors, who is really to blame for the shocking mess we are in?

Some good comments. I am pleased to see your apology,Lidia,because I was
trying to understand why you would (I thought intentionally ) give pointless aggravation to Wester,when he had pointed out that he wasn’t happy about the name error in a previous comment.
As some seem to forget,I will just point out again that the agricultural system that keeps our bubble population fed is dependent on the use of massive quantities of fossil fuel.
Divesting in fossil fuel companies might give you that warm glow of feeling that you are helping to solve the problem,but unfortunately reality doesn’t care about what you think.
To have had any chance of avoiding our predicament,we would have had to have had politicians since about 1970 shouting from the rooftops (and following it up with policies) that the maximum number of children per couple should be one, to bring the population down to below one billion,so that at least it might be possible to keep people fed without the use of fossil fuel.
Those who are starry-eyed about the current pope and his encyclical would do well to remember the enormously influential role the catholic church has had in thwarting the efforts of ecologically knowledgeable people trying to bring population control to the forefront of concerns of governments around the world. Even at this late stage,and after lamenting the wasteland being created by the human swarm ,he still recommends a maximum family size of three.
Of course,as I have mentioned previously,I think stopping the use of fossil fuels is the best course. The point I was making here is that when most of those advocating discontinuing the use of fossil fuels realize that they will be starving as a consequence of doing that,they
will quickly reverse their position. Is that understandable? Of course.
We are in a dilemma of multi-layered complexity. No way out that I can see.

@djl, and what are the limits, as far as you know, to what “the masses” will “allow”? Please point out a time in history when the masses did not go along with torture, rape, murder and pillaging (as long as the correct people were being pillaged)?

The US just intentionally bombed a hospital and who’s losing sleep over that, much less rioting in the streets? Do you see anyone, ’cause I don’t.

Netanyahu really put both feet in the foul propaganda hokum this time.

Lying psychopathic murderer Netanyahu tries to milk the standard Holohoax meme for political gain (times are tough & getting tougher in occupied Palestine), but he gets pilloried by his own incredulous
true-believer flock.

“NETANYAHU DENIES THE HITLER ZOMBIE?”

German prosecutors could capture & extradite Netty under the law. Then, put him on trial for the sinister crime of denying any aspect of the sacred Holy Holohoax.

What next – questioning the six million suffering Jews gassed & completely burned w/o a trace of forensic evidence by monster foaming-at-the-mouth German Zombies?

SIX MILLION JEWS GASSED TO DEATH & ALL THE GASSED BODIES COMPLETELY BURNED W/O A TRACE OF MATERIAL OR PHYSICAL EVIDENCE.

Even the Zionist Israeli pathological liars, who deliberately & consciously perpetuate the greatest hoax in history can’t get their “story” straight.

“After WW2, the nation plan for transport just happens to be the motor industry plan, which involved construction of highways for automobiles and truck. What say di ordinary people have? None.”

These freeways also sliced through agricultural land and vibrant minority communities that were politically weak. Those communities didn’t welcome these incursions, but were either conned into compliance or too weak, uninformed and disorganized to resist.

Lidia said: “@djl, and what are the limits, as far as you know, to what “the masses” will “allow”? Please point out a time in history when the masses did not go along with torture, rape, murder and pillaging (as long as the correct people were being pillaged)?”

@Lidia,

I really don’t know what the limits may be. But it seems many jump at the opportunity to place all responsibility on others. This essay, and the volume of “likes” it has received, helps demonstrate that. Perhaps that in itself is reflective of your point, that most just go along with whatever. Placing all the responsibility on others advocates denial and in a way acceptance.

My point here doesn’t really concern rape, murder, pillaging or negativity in the general sense. Unfortunately those things can’t really be eradicated.

However there was certainly an extensive period in human history when we existed as hunter-gatherers (you’ve read this before). This lifestyle did not enable systematic hierarchy or allow for the existence of an elite.

If we don’t take some responsibility for the situation, if we don’t realize our part in this, we’ll probably act impractically.

For instance, we may address the powerful and dismantle civilization, but if we don’t recognize our somewhat willing dependency on these people, if we don’t realize our own irresponsibility and contribution to this predicament, if we don’t begin to voluntarily tackle the population problem, learn to identify, gather or grow edible foods, etc., the resulting circumstances will certainly be disastrous.

Some may say it’s too late to act. Others suggest action is the antidote to despair.

Also, maybe using focused meditation or directed thought with a critical mass number of participants some kind of quantum mechanics effect could possibly be engaged to disassociate the CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere and raise the pH in the oceans. Some physics experiments have shown something like this is possible, to have an effect on the molecular level using thought or some other mental processes, since it has been shown that apparently the conscious observer affects the reality. I think it’s the double slit experiment? A Japanese researcher and meditator has shown how it is possible to change the molecular structure of water with the mind.

Once collapse is widespread and if the biosphere had not gotten any better, if people were getting skillful at meditation and developing calm minds, we could all just agree to mindfully starve together and pass peacefully. Sounds better than murder and mayhem to me.

Of course it’s only dreaming but rather a more pleasant one than what we’ve been presented so far, mostly by Hollywood, for the likely collapse scenario, Mad Max and so forth. We’ve been prepped for it quite thoroughly if you think of how many movies and tv shows there have been with the same theme.

The people of America have been given a choice between fossil fuels and nothing. A capitalist society has owners, they decide what choices ordinary people get, and to them the people are cattle whose heads are kept in the trough and filled with whatever maximizes their profits. In America, that meant lots of big dumb ridiculously wasteful cars and people wasting their lives doing a lot of completely unnecessary driving. But it produced the highest possible profits and so it was the only choice we were allowed.

Capitalism must eliminate any choice that doesn’t maximise profits, and that means we are left with the most wasteful and destructive of possible options. This is so obvious, but American don’t notice just as fish don’t notice the water they swim in.

We can never become an ecologically based society under capitalism. It is impossible. Capitalists inherently believe that society should be based on the idea of insatiable individual greed with the goal of seeking obscene levels of wealth accumulation. How can anyone claiming to care about ecology not know that this is the central issue?

Excellent comment, Kevin Moore. Rich with subtlety and empathy. Your analysis is like taking a big fat magnifying glass to the broad brush strokes painted by some here 🙂

——–

Jimbot, meditation (which has much to do with the idea of surrender) might just about be the only thing one could do. Meditation (which has much to do with mindfulness and listening) might be just where the current crisis is directing us. If we care to listen, that is! What’s more, meditation is one of those things that help us realize there’s little difference between individual meditation and group meditation, just as there is little difference between one and the other, in the final analysis.

Gloucon X, well said… “How can anyone claiming to care about ecology not know that this [capitalism] is the central issue?”

The interest-and-debt based money system is closely related to capitalism which is yet another invention of the sociopaths who have risen to power in a highly centralized world where most humans have lost their connection to place and land, making them susceptible to newly invented stories of progress, development and dominion over an unforgiving nature. Rich or poor, East or West, the members of civilization universally believe in these stories. When we believe the rocks and the rivers and the mountains are not living things, we enact our beliefs and make sure we dam rivers and blow up mountain tops resulting in a dead planet. Indigenous peoples think differently which is why we survived in harmony for 99.9% of our time here. Then the cancer kicked in and metastasized.

We fail to realize that we were all indigenous not that long ago. What a shame that we look down upon our past. What a shame that we look down upon people who still live like they have always lived in the past.

Capitalism is a feature of a centralized world, not of one where 10,000 tribes thrived in relative harmony with their surroundings. And we throw around the word “tribalism” loosely without a second thought.

Disclaimers:

It was no utopia, indigenous people are much like modern man but with a different set of stories in their hearts, stories that encourage respect and reverence toward all creation around them, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, mountains… talking about ecological destruction, this is the main difference between them and civilized people that has enabled to live in harmony for 2 million years while it has taken us less than 200 or 2,000 years to destroy it all. It’s the stories we believe in.

We all need to slow down, relax and meditate now. That could be a cure for capitalism and lead to personal and collective salvation. It’s all related.

You say, “Some may say it’s too late to act. Others suggest action is the antidote to despair.”

I don’t see those two ideas as mutually exclusive. In fact, to me they are completely independent. As everyone here knows, it may be “too late” to achieve the outcome of not raising world temperatures to a dangerous level. At the same time, all of us (even those like me who promote the idea of “Surrendering to What Is”) are nonetheless acting.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concept of action, but from my view inaction is impossible for any living being. The reason is that every action by a living being is part of one positive feedback loop or another. This leads in one short step to Severeid’s Law: solutions cause problems.

What I mean by this word salad might be clarified (or not!) by invoking Stuart Kauffman’s definition of life: “Life is an autonomous, autocatalytic agent, or open system, situated in and part of an environment which it senses, capable of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.”

IMO this characteristic of life is endemic to all behaviours of living beings, at all levels from intra-cellular chemical reactions right up to the most abstract human social technologies. It is impossible to escape from positive feedback loops if one wishes individual or collective life to continue.

Because I hold these views, I see ideas like blame, shame and guilt as subjective human social-emotional constructs, and consequently meaningless in any objective sense. They can seem very real, and we have built endless systems of reward and punishment around them. In the final analysis however, they’re just feelings, and are as vaporous, individual and change-prone as any other feeling. I don’t think one can understand what’s actually going on by examining peoples feelings about it. In anthropo-speak, I take an etic rather than an emic position toewards human behaviour.

This is not to say that feelings aren’t important, just that they don’t exist within any absolute, objective frame of reference. As a result they are untrustworthy foundations for even quasi-universal social contracts. They can certainly work in that capacity for a while – hatred towards out-groups and scapegoats, as well as in-group exceptionalism being canonical examples. But in general, feelings tend to be too context-dependent to make them a reliable social currency.

This is why I prefer to discount exhortations of blame, culpability, revenge and retribution. They’re just part of the social soundscape.

“So, to maintain any kind of restitution and restoration of dignity, we must drag them from their corridors of power, their boardrooms and their palaces, and put their heads on poles”. The whole activity may, of course, serve nothing other than a personal catharsis, but I can’t find anything wrong with that. Maybe you will nail it down for the next essay but time is of the essence I fear.

I saw this article yesterday and realised that little has changed in direct-action protest in fifty years:
Tryweryn: Personal stories 50 years after drowninghttp://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-34528336
Reading of the the direct action back then was inspiring but this paragraph had a particular resonance and it brought me back down to earth: “The reception we had in Liverpool was awful. People were spitting at us and throwing rotten tomatoes at us. It was an awful disappointment”.

I have identified four stages of insurrectionist protest which I term: 1. Letter writers, 2. Marchers, 3. Rioters, 4. Kamikazes. If each stage of protest gave accreditation to each other rather than denigration, then success may be achieved. It is my contention that violence does not beget violence – it gets results. Compliance to the status quo is a Spectrum Disorder.

———————-

Underlying much of the resistance to change is both denial and fear. Please consider my poem in this vein. I wrote it from the female perspective of a husband’s marital infidelity but the psychological underpinnings and implications are much wider.

THE GRACE OF DENIAL

Please cover me in your lies, let me wear them as my skin.
Let their delicate scent linger as mist on your cold pillow.
Let me taste them on your kiss when you return.
And let me feel the touch of them on my body when you hold me in darkness.

Raise me upon them so that I may stand proud for all to see.
Let their enduring shadow follow us as a guardian angel.
And may their grace lie fallow until the end of time.
But please my beloved, never dare to tell me that which I dare not hear.

Better to be hit with the truth than kissed with a lie – Old Russian Proverb.

——————————–

On my visit to Oradour Sur Glane last month, I discovered that the Nazi Panzer division, after slaughtering the entire village of 642, mostly by machine gunning the victims’ legs, and then setting them on fire, showed much compassion in sparing all the domestic animals, not even a canary was killed. The discoverers of the massacre were confronted by many cowering pet dogs looking for their owners. I was unable to find out what happened to them.http://www.oradour.info/ruined/chapter2.htm

You can be Compassionate, Intelligent, and a Nazi – any two, but not all three.

Since Guy has refused to do it, or at least he has failed to inform me,I want to officially start the NBL Death CULT. Those who chose to join must first sign the “DEATH CLAUS”, which states: I_______(name, fictitious or not) do hereby pledge to kill myself on DEC 3, 2,222.
Now I know, you are sayin, “You fool, I’ll be dead already.”
True, but the commitment shows we are serious about the nature about nature
You should have time to set your house, or cave, in order. Now this is a secret, DO NOT TELL-ANYONE. We will know fellow members by t-shirts.
I propose we all wear t-shirts which read: 2+2=4. Get it four twos.
(think on it-let me know)

“Internal fossil fuel industry memos reveal decades of disinformation — a deliberate campaign to deceive the public that continues even today.

For nearly three decades, many of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to deceive the public about the realities and risks of climate change.

Their deceptive tactics are now highlighted in this set of seven “deception dossiers”—collections of internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.

Each collection provides an illuminating inside look at this coordinated campaign of deception, an effort underwritten by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy, and other members of the fossil fuel industry.”

John Holloway has some excellent writing on capitalist reification. Or making the capitalist paradigm real. Re-creating it every day. Day in day out. Interminably.

Talk to any good North Amerikan anywhere. I mean the ones who know good and well what is going on with the climate, the fossil fuels, the lifestyle, the living arrangements, the horror, the carnage, the terror and the shrieks in the night from the most helpless.

To a person, all these good people (no names please) get up every day and drive to work. Take hot showers. Run the A/C. Munch down the factory farmed animals, etc, etc …

Ask any one of them and they’ll tell you that they ~have~ to do it. Nice little coterie of genocidal modal verbs. They ~must~ do it. They ~can not~ not do it.

Even though they can see it, identify it, grok it etc, they won’t really do a damn thing about any of it. Still driving. Still flying. Not moving closer to the job or the fruit market or where-ever. Not joining the animal liberation front. Not stopping watching TV. Not raising hell where it good and well ought to be raised. Ad Vomitorium…

Yes, American infrastructure was built out to destroy life on earth. And us little people had nut all to say about any of it.

But some saw it, and some dropped the car, quit flying, went veg-head, moved closer to the gig, started biking, etc…
That officially makes them mentally ill according to most people.

What the hell then is my problem? Was it that I got a hold of Camus and Sartre and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard at age 19? AM i just some kind of lefty do-gooder that makes everybody uncomfortable? Cuz I give a dam and/or DO something or Act on the information? Yes. I must be totally absolutely bonkers.

I mean hell I am not perfect. By a long shot or any shot. I still have to use deodorant and shave and show up to do my work not looking or smelling like a homeless person because I have to get my salary paid in disney world E-tickets, or else the nice old church ladies will kick me out on the street and i’ll starve.

OK – so I finally after months got my friend in the states to read this site and figure out what’s really going on. He’s decided to ride his bike to work every day. 10 miles each way. 20 miles round trip. Says he can’t do his life with being a father to his kids any other way. He’s serious. He also says it is probably the most dangerous thing he’s ever done since the roads are packed with multi ton cement trucks and racist redneck yahoos who’d just as soon run him over and take the jail time out of sheer absolute hatred and vicious spite for anyone who doesn’t base their life on modal verbs. That’s the deal.

And he’s a very conservative right wing religious gun nut. So what the hell is this schtick about Webster being a leftist?

Much easier to sing those pleasant mantras to yourself all the way to the grave. Who cares really? Why not just live out a very lovely and comfortable life in the white heavenly bublicious wonderland?

Because at the end of the day, everybody more or less is going to turn fasci and demand to keep hearing other people tell them wonderful sto-ries about how things ~have~ to be; ~must~ be; ~will~ be. The greatest modal verb sto-ries ever told. Ad nauseum. Til death do us part.

I mean most everybody I encounter anymore is fasci anyway or very, extremely fasci-friendly on every level. And most of these first and third worlders would gladly put a knife in my back as soon as they hear a modal verb drop out of any red white and blue fascist’s mouth.

Probably the last persons left to die on the earth will be extreme fascist misogynist ecocidal flesh-eating maniacal rapists killers and lunatics. Most days that’s what everybody who’s still here looks like anyway. And that just seems to be the logical outcome of this particular human social and cultural formation. Yeah verily. And it ~must~ be. And it ~has~ to be. And it ~will~ be. Amen.

Isn’t anyone anywhere willing to toss a stick of dynamite down those silos that have the post apocalyptic condos for the rich?
Wait. Don’t answer that question.

Guy,
Your recent PRN archive podcast cuts out half way in, just as you get to your first caller who asks about the educational system. The podcast proceeds to repeat the first half of the show again. You may want to find an accurate recording of the show and re-archive it.
Just letting you know…

Thanks much, TimBloom. Studio engineer writes: “I will look, I hadn’t heard that and I am glad you told me. That is so weird since I took the audio straight from the recording. If the guest is correct, I did something wrong and I will fix it when I get in. Around 1-1:15.”

He’s on Eastern time. I expect a corrected version in the archives by 2:00 p.m. Eastern, with my thanks and apologies.

“We all need to slow down, relax and meditate now. That could be a cure for capitalism and lead to personal and collective salvation. It’s all related.”

Well I do agree with slowing down.

How to behave? Is it by trying to do right, or instead refraining from wrong? I favor the latter. Good seems to be the default setting of our world. It’s like driving a car. You don’t drive by forcing the car to go straight. Instead, the car goes straight if all you do is make small adjustments to the steering wheel to keep it from veering off course. So I see slowing down in that light–discarding all the useless thoughts and actions that plague us from morning till night. Although I’m barely trying to approach meditation (and inconsistently at that) I wonder if it doesn’t do some of the above by its very nature?

@Wester, what would happen to you if you let go of your anger? Would you shrivel up and blow away? I don’t know why you are where you are if you hate the people around you. Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t you teaching ENGLISH (the language of global imperialist oppression) to facilitate the locals’ participation in the same system you’re railing against? You’re still showing up to get your E-tickets but you’re angry that everyone else isn’t jumping off the grid? Where is your stick of dynamite, exactly?

I’m sorry I insinuated that you are a leftist. I don’t know what a “leftist” is anymore. My apologies. But help me understand what it is that you think you can fix. The sheer overcrowding of humanity is what compels it to act in aggressive ways. Similar to most American leftists I have heard, you seem to believe in capacities that do not exist, so from that stems my confusion.

I am not ever saying how things “should” be: that appears to be your territory. I try to observe how things ARE, and learn from that. I do not “reify” capitalism, I see it as an effective technology adding to the rendition of the living planet into human biomass. Without capitalism, there would be no “leverage” to induce people to consume the future even when their instincts might suggest caution. That sort of wording might sound like approval when (implementing a literal rather than an emotional reading) it is not. Effective means effective, not good or wonderful.

I used to be more angry when I thought my actions were important, and we were all individual actors who made choices; that we were all morally culpable just by dint of existing. But that’s not really the case, so being angry is useless, dynamite is useless. The process will play out until we are gone, and it will keep playing out thereafter. People’s references to the long period of pre-civilization as being a meaningful state we can return to are perplexing. It’s kind of like saying President Obama or Pol Pot was peaceful when he was an embryo. None of us as embryos were particularly taxing, but we grew, and we grew in complexity, and we grew in needs, and we outgrew the mother we parasitized. So none of this is particularly new.

Spot on Wester.
I will state again that
Those who are the most complicit are the ones who are first in line with the “all us humans are equally guilty and we had no choice” meme.
It’s an easy out, but then isn’t that what we’re used to? Easy everything and all of it guilt free?

Zarquon- Welcome.
Nice poem.
It figures that you’re INTP, like Lidia. Autists of various degrees seem to inhabit that niche.
I took the test and joined mensa while in high school, thinking it might help my chances for a scholarship. It didn’t. And everyone who found out thought it was a pathetic attempt to plug some deep hole in my life. Yes, the deep hole was my mediocre grade point average, brought about by boredom. (No offense to you, that was just my experience.) I was attacked on every front, including my own mother!
But what the hell, I was just a kid trying to get by, learning everything the hard way as usual. I doubt I could still pass the test, as for every question I demand first off a definition of terms. In IQ tests, this is something you have to figure out on the fly – what were the test developers thinking/wanting? What do these white men want/expect?
Example- question: There are 5 birds on a fence, and you shoot one. How many birds are left? Correct answer: None. The others have long since fled before you even did the math.
The true definition of intelligence, in my opinion, is the ability to live in balance and with grace towards all creation, without ruining a planet, or causing undue pain for other creatures, and to send a very small packet of your genes forward in time. But that was then. Things are totally FUBAR now so none of this applies.

.
I never realized until just this moment that medi-tation was just one letter away from spelling medi-station. I’ll tell ya, ‘the one’ is certainly much cheaper than ‘the other.’ lol!

I remember when I first learned about the power of serious meditation. I was living in hell, because my oil loving redneck neighborhood was severely hating on me for being a hippy-dippy ‘tree fucking hugger’ (their term for me). After years of ‘standing up to them’ and ‘not taking their abuse lying down’, I eventually developed an ulcer, was getting the cops called on me regularly over made up lies and slanderous accusations, and was also suffering from having my property damaged and vandalized on a ridiculously regular basis. My western ways had taught me that you had to stand up for yourself directly, but in retrospect, all this seemed to accomplish was to escalate things even further. My force was just being met with more force from all of them, and round and round it all went … endlessly, for years and years of living here.

Then a dear, wise, female friend recommended that I try meditation instead of fighting with the neighborhood directly through engagement and direct confrontation. I thought that was stupid, frankly. Sure, it might help me to be calmer about the situation, but how was my meditating going to stop any abuse from being heaped upon me by neighborhood of redneck oil lovers? They, in my view, would have to be the ones meditating in order to affect any change. Isn’t that how it all works, isn’t it just a personal and internal thing?

Well, eventually my ulcer became so bad that I started meditating with little miss yoga pants … like seriously meditating. Mainly I tried it because I was about ready to hang myself at that point, literally, so I tried it as a final and last resort. To my surprise, and without any conscious actions on my part other than my newfound meditation routine, my neighborhood problems just evaporated away in the strangest of ways.

First, my ulcer disappeared and healed all on its own. Then, one of the major antagonists on the block had a massive stroke and was no longer capable of fanning the flames of hatred towards me (which had gone on for years); he finally had his own ‘real’ problems to deal with now. The other major antagonist, the vandalizer across the street, became so incensed over no longer being able to get a rise out of me that he just self destructed one day and put his house up for sale and moved away … all in, like, a month. His parting shot was to say to everyone on the block that he didn’t want to live near someone like me anymore. What a martyr … he thought his outburst and moving away would have some big affect on the neighborhood … that it would cause some retaliation for him having to move his family away from the kind hearted long haired guy. Nope, a few months later and everyone had forgotten about his outburst and had just moved on with their lives. Great! Have at ‘er buddy! Smell ya later! It was nirvana … absolutely pure bliss.

Many other little ‘things’ changed for me in my external world as well, too many to iterate here. But, all in all, I was quite shocked to witness the transformation that took place in my external reality over what was only about a six month period. Little miss yoga pants now had me fairly convinced about the power of serious meditation regarding its use as a tool for affecting change the external world. The outer reflecting the inner and all that irrational crazy woo nonsense. Who knew?

Basically, I’d been fighting force with force, which just begets more force in the end … it’s actually a universal Taoistic law (which I learned later when I started exploring Taoism.) It’s also a very western idea to suggest that aggression must always be met with more weapons and an equal or stronger application of force. I now understand why the Dali Lama laughed when describing how he always waves and says ‘I love you’ each day to his cranky neighbor, the one who despises him. It’s powerful … it drives them mental with confusion … and then they just self destruct eventually, probably due to being so flummoxed by their violence not having any effect on you. It’s sort of the perfect weapon, really.

Anyway, I guess maybe that’s just the power of love. Then again, I’m just a dumb musician guy, so what would I know, right? Alternatively, I suppose I could have also just carpet bombed the neighbors into non-existence … maybe? Maybe not though.

That’s my irrelevant story about meditation. Other people’s mileage may vary, as it always does.

I think few writers, and this is one of our greatest living, know the damaged chromosome in man better than Mr. McCarthy.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“You have to carry the fire.”
I don’t know how to.”
Yes, you do.”
Is the fire real? The fire?”
Yes it is.”
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

Thanks for those links, I had heard of that one I think. There is another where the subjects were able to raise the temperature ( of air I think ) through directed thought, apparently proving quantum effects. The water molecule alignment experiment is referenced in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?”

Kevin Moore’s comment, agree, as with all of his efforts here for our benefit.

Along the woo-woo theme, here’s another radical concept. The originator in modern times is Hira Ratan Manek ( HRM ), a civil engineer who decided to revive this ancient knowledge as a retirement project. He was apparently shown in different scientific studies to have gone for several months without ingesting solid food while maintaining his body in perfect health. He says the energy is coming directly from the sun.

Of course, we all know that we must never stare at the sun. The key is to do it at sunrise or sunset so the sun’s rays are being filtered through the atmosphere. Lots of info on it. Wonder what the food conglomerates think.

Thank you for the excellent and thought provoking essay, Tim Buchanan. I agree that the abuser/victim narratives must be smashed in order for any kind of transformation/healing to happen, even if there is no justice served- but is it too late? Can we really live life on our own terms, and besides the few holdout tribes, are there any wild humans left? Would we be able to embody that wildness at the moment of truth when we must personally engage our ‘reactive politics’, as you describe them?

What is ‘revengism’ anyway, but direct perpetuation of the violence of patriarchy? Caroline and Wren both bring up the poet Mary Oliver with apparent disappointment that she has carried on in the Romantic tradition without tackling the obvious dark hour and nature of our existence. But I see her work as a form of radicalism in that she does not embrace nature, she does not use it as a path to transcendence in search of the spiritual- she embodies it, becomes it, functions from it. She isn’t like her contemporaries- feminist poets of the 60s and 70s- she didn’t live as openly gay, doesn’t take on the sociopolitical topics like Adrienne Rich, does not analyze or philosophize like Susan Griffin, and does not equate with her male counterparts in that while they still reference nature as other, carnal, a path to the higher masculine realms of spirituality, she appears to have found a way to partially disengage from patriarchy and to occupy the sensual wholly through her quiet communion with the earth. A brave act for a woman who suffered extreme childhood sexual abuse, patriarchal violence which ultimately separates women from their ‘being’ and belonging, a weapon of mass control.

An excerpt from Susan Griffin’s, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her:

The Zoological Garden

“In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. She was born in this garden. She has never in her life stretched those legs. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. Only once did she use her claws. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. And it was her keeper’s flesh. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. How lucky for her he survived the blow. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. They fed her with tubes. They observed her. They wrote comments in notebooks. And finally they rendered a judgment. She was normal. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangerous, whose anger can kill, they had said. Be more careful of her, they advised. Allow her less excitement. Perhaps let her exercise more. She understood none of this. She understood only the look of fear in her keeper’s eyes. And now she paces. Paces as if she were angry, as if she were on the edge of frenzy. The spectators imagine she is going through the movements of the hunt, or that she is readying her body for survival. But she knows no life outside the garden. She has no notion of anger over what she could have been, or might be. No idea of rebellion.

It is only her body that knows of these things, moving her, daily, hourly, back and forth, back and forth, before the bars of her cage.”

Hello, hello, I’ve been meaning to say hello for some time now! I run into tech problems from this site, as well as from my end, often enough that I get derailed and sulk off to converse with you in my head. Anyway, excellent commentary! You may be interested in an interview I read recently, in which Oliver answers some of the questions you posed here. I do have some favorite poems of hers, but I like the feeling I get when I read these two in succession:

Rage

You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
in your public clothes
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child’s mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows–
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she’s a tree
that will never come to leaf–
in your dreams she’s a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments–
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

ANDREW TAYLOR – Good question about the El Nino related radiation spike. We had a conference call today with Woods Hole Inst. Dr Ken Buesseler: “The Fukishima groundwater is almost impossible to stop, espically since TEPCO will not accept our assistance. Also a problem since the media & public have lost interest in efforts to contain the leaks. Ice dams, things you can engineer to stop them, have never been done on this scale before, so it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen.”

Myself on DOE recorded line: “Can anyone — scientists, physicists, anyone — really estimate the levels that are coming out of Fukushima on a daily basis? Now with this rain event…can TEPCO possibly estimate the cesium? The Euro satellites show the radioactive plume is streaming into the El Nino current, So is this going to be a bigger problem in the near future. Can I say that?”

Ken: “It’s never happened before… I don’t know where these predictions can really be nailed down. We will have to look for a record of increased skin cancer cases.”

I will report more for those who are interested in the radioactive effects of El Nino. Talking with Roland at NOAA Colorado next.

I know we want de-population, however some people might want to avoid developing cancer due to extreme exposure event continuing today. The EPA is trying to prove that Pacific ocean toxins & acidification do play a part in this rapidly intensifying El Nino.

NASA & Spaceweather.com if you want to know more about the long duration X-class flare. It is a part of this unusual Black “Grey” Swan event. Also the Hurrinane off Mexico just jumped to Cat 4 so that is stiring up the radioactive plume moving south from Alaska to Mix with El Nino upwelling.

We have totally failed in keeping the public properly informed and protected from the fallout. Scientists and NOAA officials continue to express concern about this unusual radioactive spike.

We all wonder about the causes. Only KTLA TV has been willing present the facts, but even their reporting failed to make any connection whatsoever to the ongoing state of affairs stemming from the tragic 2011 events at Fukushima.

Here are a few recent examples… A September 2015 audio report from Robin Corcoran, biologist from the Kodiak Wildlife National Refuge, confirms local reports that “emaciated” bird carcasses are washing up on Kodiak Island shores… The program concluded by stating that multiple species of birds have declined in number in other Alaska regions… A few days before the Kodiak reports… Josh Saranpaa of the Wildlife Center of the North Coast was quoted as saying, “Every bird we’re seeing is starving to death. It’s pretty bad.” Saranpaa added, “When you see so many starving, something is not quite right out there.”… Julia Reis of the Half Moon Bay Review writes with understatement, “There have been noticeable changes in the Pacific Ocean that have caused difficulties for marine life of late.” Gerry McChesney of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge says that the die-off has him all the more “baffled” because of the strip of cold water in his area full of food for these birds. In my mind’s eye, I can see McChesney scratching his head as I read that he considers poisoning, starvation, and El Nino as possible causes for the die-off. The article ends with the following comment by McChesney, “We might have to see some other problem in the ocean before we understand what’s causing the die-off.”

Cynthia McKinney (6 terms in Congress) points to the problem of the massive die-off happening from San Diego to Alaska—all along the West Coast of the U.S. Cynthia highlights report words like “strange,” “unprecedented,” “crazy,” “worst,” with this iconic quote from The Sacramento Bee: “Our gut tells us there is something going on in the marine environment.”

We don’t want to disturb the fragile economy or upset corporate advertisers therefore media outlets provide limited coverage of marine anomalies. They rarely mention global warming, toxic algae, or the continuing release of Fukushima radiation. It is this silence that is deafening!…

BABAJINGO & LIDIA, I do want to know why in the face of what appear to be Pacific Ocean die-offs, El Nino is mentioned and not the Fukushima-related elevated levels of radiation. As long as there is a palpable lack of transparency in the mainstream media’s ordinary coverage of extraordinary environmental events, that includes what one senses as a reticence to discuss the obvious.

Will there be a proliferation of citizen journalists and citizen scientists seizing upon each piece of new data trying to make sense out of a government-approved narrative?? Even Guy has stopped adding this info to his Monster climate report!

So all we have left is Kevin MOORE & Roberts Collapse data sheet? Except for me in my last month here I suppose We should not rely on government officials to tell us the truth about the full extent of these El Nino radioactive spikes. I don’t even know if it is all from Fukushima’s fallout or is other radioactive material being dumped in the Pacific? Korean sub fleet? China’s nuke plants? Be aware.

@Wren, first off, I’m not an INTP. I don’t actually think that is a category.

You say, “The true definition of intelligence, in my opinion, is the ability to live in balance and with grace towards all creation, without ruining a planet, or causing undue pain for other creatures, and to send a very small packet of your genes forward in time. But that was then. Things are totally FUBAR now so none of this applies.”

You said you like to understand terms before approaching a problem, but your own definition is full of ambiguous terms.

“Balance”: there is no such thing in a universe constantly in flux. We are always off-balance.

“Grace”: can you tell us what this is? Like obscenity, should we know it when we see it…? I have heard the word used to intend “mercy”. I’m fairly big on mercy these days, to the objection of some.

“Creation” assumes a creator. Do you have an opinion on the nature of that entity? What are the boundaries of “creation”? Is creation an ongoing process, or were we created at a certain point only then to wreak our own havoc unaided further by any special One (and who created the One?). Might we not be self-creating (not in the sense of a willful plan, but in the sense of rising to expediency..)? If we are our own Creators, then what we Create cannot be against our own “will” or tendencies.

“Ruining a planet”: Do dinosaur or bacteria worry about whether they ruin anything?

Living without causing any other creature “undue” pain: what is “due” pain, as opposed to “undue” pain? There’s a whole gamut, from experimenting on live animals, through the consumption of commercial meat products, all the way to sweeping ants out of one’s path.

“to send a very small packet of your genes forward in time”: What about this is “intelligent”? Is the sending intelligent, or just the “very smallness” of it..? Is giving birth to dwarfs better?

On what basis could one say things are FUBAR only now, since for many millennia humans have been responsible for species exterminations?

If the current planet is dying, how is that not analogous to any other living being which dies? What living entity was ever guaranteed eternal life?

—–
My definition of intelligence is the capacity to draw analogies. If this, then that. Guy’s high intelligence allows him to look at a certain paper and extrapolate: “if this, then that”. People of lesser intelligence won’t be able to draw the same conclusions, and people of similar intelligence may be hampered by emotional hurdles like parenthood.

—
So, if this, then that.
If 7 billion, then violence.
If perceived beauty, then human poem.
There’s nothing that excludes one from the other.

P.S. I really liked your bird problem description! I hope you take this in the same spirit…

P.P.S. For the third or fourth time, I’ll re-state that my arrival at the notion of a deterministic universe was not an easy one, rather a painful one which meant giving up a much-prized (but false) sense of agency. Much easier, imo, to circle the wagons and blame.